HP Enlists 3PAR for its New Converged Storage Slate

Posted on December 09, 2013 By Pedro Hernandez

HP is championing a "New Style of IT" that delivers advanced cloud services and cuts Big Data down to size.

To help data center operators tackle these IT-intensive challenges, the company has unveiled its HP Converged Storage slate. Combined with its new HP ConvergedSystem product line, the new enterprise data storage offerings are meant to help organizations unlock the business-boosting potential of their data.

Unsurprisingly, IT execs and managers will shoulder much of the burden.

Bill Veghte, executive VP and general manager of HP's Enterprise Group, envisions that CIOs and CTOs will soon play a critical role in helping to lay out business strategies and will be "relied upon to drive growth, accelerate innovation and manage risk." HP's new converged products for data centers will help pave the way, he said.

"HP ConvergedSystem and HP Converged Storage offerings enable our customers to use technology to deliver business outcomes that drive their success, by creating an agile pool of resources that can deploy quickly, accelerate results and transform an organization's most valuable asset -- its data -- into actionable competitive insight," said Veghte in a statement.

The HP Converged Storage portfolio takes "a single approach to primary storage and to data protection and retention," according to the company.

HP is leveraging 3PAR technology to deliver the storage array piece of the puzzle. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based IT heavyweight acquired 3PAR in 2010 for over $2 billion.

3PAR's flash-optimized systems are the answer to businesses that are struggling to deliver responsive cloud infrastructures. Featuring fine-grained quality-of-service (QoS) management options, 3PAR provides a high-performance storage foundation "those who might otherwise be stalled by service-level inconsistencies during their deployment of virtualization and IT as a Service for their most critical applications."

Later this month, HP will be offering new 480 GB and 920 GB SSD options. Version 3.1.3 of the underlying 3PAR OS will be released in January. HP also plans to release its Priority Optimization software in January.

In terms of data protection, HP is relying on products like its StoreOnce 6500 storage systems to grant storage administrators the ability to "efficiently manage exponential data growth by protecting more data in less time," said HP. Compared to EMC Data Domain, StoreOnce Backup provides "four times the backup performance and up to 10 times faster recovery," according to the company. HP StoreOnce 6500 goes on sale in January for $375,000.

Finally, to help businesses glean insights from their massive stores of data, HP is touting StoreAll Archive's Big Data capabilities. It features open object storage interfaces and integrated search tools that ferret out information "100,000 times faster than traditional approaches."

HP expects its StoreAll OS v6.5 to be released in January. StoreAll 8800 ships in February and will be priced at 97 cents per GB. HP's StoreAll 8200 Gateway Storage will be available in February and will be priced at $34,650.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.